My inner dialogue working in and with institutions

An inner dialogue, a negotiation in order to do me.

Dear Black, Indigenous, Person of Color and Queer and Trans Person of Color,

I have three areas I’m forming theories and theses about through my research: The project, the research process, and working within institutions. By the ‘project,’ I mean the part of my work where I work closely with people–starting friendships, interviews, home tours, conversations over dinner. The ‘research process’ is how I do the interviews, home tours, and workshops and thinking about them politically. What does the power dynamic feel like? How is the experience, time, and knowledge of the people I work with valued and compensated for?

This piece has some of my first thoughts about how I might work on a project about non-institutionalized knowledge of Black, Indigenous, People of Color and Queer People of Color from within an institution. My questions and work could be done through a local summer long artists residency or a short weekend inviting friends over, but I’m choosing to do it through a PhD so I want to be as intentional as possible with how I do it.

Through the project, I know I’ll be carving out space for the statement I’m making (and deciding what the work is not) through my writing, the way I choose to play out my work with people, and how I get and use any funding from university and institutional grants. Everyone who does a PhD goes through this, which has me thinking about myself and how I will personally manage to work with institutions. By institutions, I mean Monash University where I’m doing my PhD, and the fields that found a lot of the attitudes and values that are kept up in academic research like psychology and anthropology. Also known as white, cisgendered, heterosexual ways of showing up in the world.

This experience has me asking, “What does ‘good’ mean?” For the split second I wasn’t paying attention and let this person’s comment overcome me, ‘good’ meant it’s approved by field of anthropology from ‘up there.’

I intend my work with people and the objects and spaces they keep around them to be a radical non-institutionalized mental health process. I want this sentiment of following passionate recommendations, reading, and valuing voices like yours to mirror this. I want to think of this as active resistance. I take these small and big acts seriously because it’s my job to take a critical look at the landscape of literature and standards of academic rigor and incorporate it into my everyday work.

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